Palkoska's discussion is informative; however, it could benefit from a greater effort to separate the historical Aristotle, who was a sense realist, from the nominalistic versions of Aristotelianism with which Descartes was familiar at La Fleche.

In his writings we see on one side a nominalistic approach, the language of contingency, and an emphasis on the individual, and on the other side an organic/essentialist view of society, the idea that industrialism is the foundational process of modern history, and the language of necessity.

This is, according to Colyvan, a particular approach to the development of a nominalistic philosophy of mathematics that partially exemplifies what he calls the hard road to nominalism, (1) which, if generalised, represents the endeavour of constructing all of science without quantifying over mathematical entities.

The aspect I wish to highlight here is the mutually related thematic complex of divine will, of contingency, and of the epistemic valorization of particulars: as the Selbstbehauptung of nominalistic knowledge had been a recoil from God's absolute will and had thus provided a soil for rationalist grip on contingent, so it had under the same stroke of pathos conferred a legitimacy to particulars as the sole representatives of God's infinite will in the world.

In addition, his would-be nominalism allows for maximum vacuity: 'One needs to be nominalistic, no doubt: power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society' (ibid.

Different historians and theorists emphasize different influences: nominalistic philosophical and voluntaristic theological developments of the late Middle Ages and early modern period, (118) the Protestant Reformation and the political reaction to the ensuing wars of religion, (119) the achievements of science, (120) and the organized efforts of thinkers and movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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